Wednesday, 09 February 2011

• update

  Hello world!

  It's been awhile (again) since I've updated. Things are still going really good for us here in Suwon, South Korea. We started our 3rd year contract last October, so we'll be here until this coming October. After that, we plan to move back to the states and find our next home!

  Let's see, we had a long winter break. The first 2 weeks of January school was out, but we taught "winter english camp", which we do every year winter and summer (except that in summer, it's not called winter english camp, of course). I made some fun activities, and repeated some previous fun activities. Activities included: Skype video chatting with some friends of mine in America, and making up questions to ask them. Watching a movie and choosing scenes to re-enact. Labeling everything in the classroom with post it notes, right down to "trash on floor" and "teacher" and "eyes". Every time I try to get the students to label 100 things, but they can only get to about 50 or 60! What else did we do? We did something that we've done before, where we watch short cartoon clips, and one set of students describes it to their partners (who didn't see the clip), and then the partners have to answer questions about the clip based only on their partner's descriptions of it. We played Monopoly, I Spy, Mafia... and some other not-so-exciting things.

  For the next 10 days, Jenny's mom came out to visit. That also happened to be the coldest 10 days I think I've ever experienced in Korea. It didn't snow until the day before she left, but it had previously snowed, and it never got warm enough for it to melt off, so the whole time we were slipping around on ice, and hurrying from place to place to keep warm. It was fun though. Jenny enjoys having her around.

  Then we had a week of vacation to ourselves, and I had a 3ds Max rediscovery week (I have an old copy from a class I took in high school), and so I worked on that a lot and got interested in it again. I'm currently trying to find a newer version that I can buy (but not too new, cause the newest version is like 3,500 bucks!).

  Then, we had 2 days where we had to go back to school (but not teach, just BE there), and then we had a 5 day weekend for Korean/Chinese/Lunar New year!!! That was a nice vacation extension. I went snowboarding twice for the first time in a long time with my friend Lance and others. It was great, and so much cheaper than in the States! It was like $20 for rentals, and about $30 for a 4 hour lift ticket! not bad at all.

  So, today is graduation for our 3rd graders. It's a little sad for me, because these are the students who've been here as long as I have. They were new when I was new! So I've seen them all the way through middle school. There's only a handful that I've really known one-on-one, cause most of them are intimidated to try to speak English with me outside of class, but even those that I only see in class I feel like I know fairly well. So, it's a little sad to see them all go.

  Well, happy lunar new year everybody!

  • 8:20 PM
  • 87 Views
  • 0 eProps
  • 3 Comments